


Counting Song for Bitter Children

by pavlovsannabelle



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angel (Borderlands) Lives, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:33:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23248558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pavlovsannabelle/pseuds/pavlovsannabelle
Summary: “I was supposed to die,” Angel murmurs unhappily. Her hand goes to the side of her head. “What happened?”“Not sure,” says Maya. “But you’re here now, aren’t you?”[Mid-BL2 canon divergence. Angel lives. Maya helps with this endeavor.]
Relationships: Maya & Angel (Borderlands)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 26





	1. Chapter 1

Maya’s done what she’s supposed to when the girl crumples to the floor in the center of the core, but it feels like she’s made a mistake. She hasn’t had a lot of time to think about it in the past few minutes, but in the sudden silence, she feels like she’s about to.

She hangs back as Lilith and Roland approach Angel. The quiet makes the details of her surroundings creep out at her in a way they hadn’t when she arrived: the height of the ceiling, the sound of something dripping somewhere. She wants to take in anything but the body collapsed in the middle of the room.

The other two also pause about a foot from where she lies. Still, no one speaks; then Lilith makes a move toward her. That’s when Jack shows up.

The chamber explodes back into frenzied movement. Jack lunges at Lilith, and she and Angel both crackle out of the space they’ve been occupying and reappear ten feet away. While Jack pivots trying to find them again, Roland catches him with a shot inm the midsection and Jack goes down.

“Get _over_ here!” Lilith yells. Maya’s not sure if she’s talking to her, or Roland, or—well, she’s probably not talking to Jack, so Maya goes. Roland beelines for Lilith and Maya tumbles after him.

Jack is on the ground, wounded, struggling. He’s trying to say something. On her way over to Lilith, he’s easy enough, no longer a moving target. Maya shoots him in the head three times.

She reaches the others barely a moment later, almost knocking into them. She just has time to register the low humming sound of Lilith charging up to move something big before the room drops away from all four of them.

For a moment they’re nowhere. There’s that feeling Maya’s experienced a few times before when Lilith’s moved her, like being lifted firmly off the ground, not so much a weightlessness but a sudden reversing or turning sideways of the pull of gravity. The way her weight seems to move from her feet to the center of her chest, the weird feeling in her inner ear. Then in a moment it all drops away, and she feels a floor under her again.

They’re somewhere dark.

“Shit. Is she breathing?” says Lilith. Her arm is still glowing faintly, and she sticks it out over Angel as a light source. It’s not much help, just outlining the edges of her shape in a weak orange cast. Maya takes Angel’s wrist and feels for a pulse.

She doesn’t feel anything. She hopes they haven’t dragged this girl’s dead body back with them to…wherever it is they are. She—no, wait, very faintly, was that something? Maybe she’s just imagining it, or confusing it for the pulse from her own fingers—

There. She feels it again. Very faint and very slow, but she’s sure this time. 

“Well, she’s alive,” Maya says.

The three of them kneel around her body like a team of diligent paramedics minus the medical training. Maya’s eyes are beginning to adjust to the dark, and she can take in some more of their surroundings. They’re in a small room, and there’s a little light coming in through a boarded-up window. There’s a mattress on the floor shoved into one corner and a doorway leading into another dark room.

Lilith prods Angel in the face. “Hey,” she says. “Hey, kid. Wake up.” She taps her firmly across the cheek with all four fingers. “You there?”

“Don’t _hit_ her,” says Roland.

“I’m not _hitting_ her, I’m just trying to get her attention,” says Lilith. She turns Angel’s head to the left, then to the right. “Hey. Helloooo?”

Maya picks up Angel’s arm and holds it above her body. It moves with a little bit of floppiness but a little bit of resistance, the weight of something not dead but not working with you either. She doesn’t respond to the movement in any way, and Maya puts her arm back down by her side.

“Alright, stop bothering her, just give her a minute,” says Roland. He looks at Maya. “Would you stay here with her? Lilith and I need to talk.”

Lilith rolls her eyes, but gets to her feet and follows Roland into the next room. Maya can hear them whisper-arguing, trying to keep their voices low but not having much of a chance of privacy without any actual door in the doorway.

“—told you not to come—” says Roland.

“Well, it worked out fine, didn’t it—” says Lilith.

Maya makes a half-hearted attempt to eavesdrop, but ends up zoning out a little, sitting there in that dim room. She slips into the easy habit of unfocus, the brain unspooling after coming down from the flood of adrenaline a few minutes ago.

“So he’s dead,” she hears from the other room, “now what?”

Maya fixes on a little slice of bright sky coming in through the boards on the window. The contrast is so sharp it hurts to look at a little. The tiny strip of sky is all white, no features visible, like there might not actually be anything outside this room, just a light box to give the scene some atmosphere.

Lilith and Roland return after a while, and Maya snaps back to attention. With none of them sure what else to do, Lilith says, “We should get that thing on her neck off her.”

Maya reaches for the collar, and when she touches it with her gloved hand her whole arm seizes up. It sends a thrumming, paralytic jolt running up her right arm and down the whole left side of her body, doing something in her chest and trying to reach up her throat. It lasts only a second or two before she manages to break contact, but she has to take a moment to catch her breath before she can speak again.

“Don’t touch that thing,” she tells Lilith. Both of them stare at her, looking disconcerted by her little fit.

Roland approaches. “Let me see it,” he says. Maya backs off, happy not to try to touch it again. She and Lilith stand off at a distance, both watching the collar somewhat warily as Roland fiddles with it.

“Okay, it’s…it’s got a hinge or something here, if you—oh, look, you just push down on this thing here.” The metal clicks and springs open, and Roland pulls it off her neck without any trouble.

“…Ah,” says Maya. She stays back where she is, still not wanting to go near that thing again.

They all stand around for a minute, hoping that maybe now something will happen, maybe Angel will wake. They get nothing.

“Well,” says Roland, “we should get back to Sanctuary.”

“Wait,” says Lilith. “Should we…move her when she’s like this? I’m worried I might have…I don’t know, shaken something up in her brain the first time, with her being in a delicate condition and all. I don’t know if I should do it again.”

She might be right, Maya thinks—it is pretty jarring to get yanked around by Lilith’s pull, and Angel doesn’t exactly seem in the hardiest of states right now.

“I’ll stay here with her,” Maya says.

Roland and Lilith both turn to look at her. “Which is…where are we, exactly?” she asks.

“It’s a place out in the Dust I used to use as a hideout sometimes,” says Lilith. “I was just trying to get us out of there when I dropped us here, I wanted somewhere we wouldn’t be followed, I…I thought we’d go back to deal with Jack or something. Didn’t know you were going to finish it right there. I don’t know, I didn’t really have a lot of time to think about it.” She shrugs. “You should be fine staying out here for a little while. It’s way out in the middle of nowhere, no one will even give you any trouble out here.”

They move Angel to the mattress in the corner before Lilith and Roland go. If she’s not going to wake up for a while, she might as while lie on something other than the floor. Lilith snaps her fingers by Angel’s ear in one last unsuccessful attempt to rouse her, Roland says, “Call us if anything changes,” and then they’re gone.

Maya stays with Angel for a while after they leave, but nothing changes, and she can only sit there for so long, so she starts to poke around the place. It’s two rooms, the one they arrived in with the mattress and another room of the same size, this one with a couch, a couple shelves, and a bunch of boxes and garbage scattered around on the floor. When she steps outside, she finds that Lilith was right, it really is in the middle of nowhere. The ground is flat and barren all the way to the horizon, this single flat-roofed shack the only landmark visible. Maya wonders who built it, and why here.

She goes back inside and starts rooting through some of the stuff on the floor. It doesn’t seem like Lilith’s stuff—must be from whoever lived here before she got here. She finds a hand lamp that doesn’t work, a small portable radio, a fantasy novel, and a manual on water pump maintenance and repair. There’s a box of batteries on one of the shelves, and she goes through a bunch of dead ones but eventually finds some that work in the lamp, and a few for the radio as well.

She pops into the other room periodically to check if Angel’s still breathing. She always is. She’s not sure what else to do. She feels like she should be doing something to more directly help her, to actively make sure she doesn’t die instead of just waiting to see if she gets worse, but she doesn’t know what. She’s not a doctor, she doesn’t know what you do for people when this happens.

Even if she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do, what someone who knew what they were doing would do to help her, Maya feels like she should do _something_. So she sits with her. Maya feels like she’s heard that it’s good for people in comas to have someone talk to them, even if it seems like they can’t hear, but she doesn’t know what to say. She ends up bringing over that book she found earlier and reading it out loud, just to have a steady stream of words to keep saying. The book seems to be an installment in the middle of a very long series. The author does very little to recap the events or characters of previous volumes, but Maya kind of enjoys trying to piece together what’s going on mid-story; from what she can gather, the main character has recently deserted the king’s army and is now traveling across the plains looking for her sister.

It’s weird, seeing Angel in person after all this time knowing her as just a voice, a ghost-machine presence, and now that’s she’s finally here in the flesh she’s halfway to a dead body. It fills Maya with what she guesses is a kind of remorse, something that makes her feel like it’s her responsibility to intercede between this girl and her death.

She brings the radio over to the mattress and leaves it on when she leaves the room. If hearing human voices is good for Angel, Maya figures she should give her whatever dose of it she can.

Lilith calls a little after nightfall. “Hey. She wake up yet?”

Maya peeks through the doorway to the other room, just in case anything’s different, but of course it isn’t. “Nope. Still out. Not moving or anything.”

Lilith sighs. “Alright. You still good to stay there with her?”

It’s not like Maya could go much of anywhere even if she wanted to, being way out here by herself with no car. But she says, “Yeah. I’ll stay here.”

“Okay. Good. Call me if anything changes.”

Lilith hangs up. Maya sleeps on the couch.

When she wakes up, she hopes that something will have changed in the large chunk of time that has passed, but when she goes to check—no, Angel’s still out. So she waits. All there is to do is wait.

Waiting is easy, which Maya hates. It’s not being bored that she dislikes, it’s that it’s easy to have nothing happen to you, that anyone can do that. She reads to Angel some more. She flips the radio back on and sits and listens with her for a while. She goes outside every few hours, just to breathe fresher air. The bright light of the sun is always a little dazzling after the dim inside of the shack, a reminder that the sun still shines even if you haven’t been living in it.

Lilith shows up in person that afternoon, appearing in the middle of the room in a pop of blue light and instantaneously decompressing air and startling the living shit out of Maya.

“Hey,” she says simply as Maya collects herself. She looks over to where Angel is breathing shallowly on the mattress. “So. Still nothing, huh?”

“Doesn’t seem like it,” says Maya.

“Mm. You know, at this point, I…well, I don’t think it looks good.”

Maya knows what she’s trying to say, but doesn’t say anything in return.

Lilith sighs and runs a hand through her hair. “Look. If she hasn’t woken up by now, I think she’s probably going to die. I mean, you did the best you could, and it was better than just leaving her there, but…” She trails off.

“Just give it a little longer,” says Maya. “I’ll stay with her.”

“If you want to,” says Lilith. “Just…don’t get your hopes up.”

She disappears as abruptly as she arrives, leaving Maya alone with Angel. Or maybe just alone. Hard to say which one it is. Maya edges closer to the mattress and sits down next to it. 

Even if she outwardly insists otherwise, the reasonable part of Maya, deep down, is half-sure along with Lilith that the girl is going to die. Looking at the facts of the situation, it seems like the most likely conclusion. Angel had seemed pretty sure of it herself. But she hasn’t died yet, and another part of Maya thinks that’s a good sign, or at least wants to take it as one. 

Maya’s seen plenty of people die before, but not in this prolonged a manner. Not like this. Not someone who’s the same thing as her, with Maya sitting next to her in the dark holding her small blue-marked hand, the same as Maya’s. 

When Maya had rolled out into the snow off that train, separated from her group, spottily regaining consciousness, there had been that voice coming through to her in the cold. _You are alive for a reason,_ she had told her. _I am here to help you._ Back then, confused, bleeding, and numb, she’d been so grateful to hear that, to have someone reaching through the fog to her. Here, now, she very much does not want Angel to die.

Maya leans over and speaks to her. 

“Hey,” she says. “Kid. Angel. Can you hear me? You there?”

She’s not expecting a reply, but just—a muscle twitch, a furrow of an eyebrow, anything. Anything that would be justification for hope. As always, her attempts bounce uselessly off a solid wall of nothing happening.

“Okay, well, if you can hear me at all. Anywhere down there. You’re going to make it.” Even if she doesn’t know if she believes it. “You’re going to wake up, okay? Doesn’t have to be now. Whenever you’re ready. You’re going to live.”


	2. Chapter 2

The next morning, Maya isn’t getting desperate. She’s a long way from that. But she is starting to see how getting desperate could be on the horizon. How long Angel can stay like this, not dead and not waking, she has to wonder? As the hours go on, it becomes less of something to idly speculate about and more of something she actually needs an answer to. Likewise: What is she going to do if she really doesn’t wake up?

Sometimes, now, her breathing changes. It hitches at times, or changes speed, or she seems to hold her breath for a few seconds and then fall back into a rhythm. Maya isn’t sure if that means she’s coming up closer to the surface of consciousness or sinking deeper into dying. 

She sits with her. She reads to her some more. She turns the radio back on and paces around the room while she listens to the news. 

In the afternoon, she sees Angel’s fingers twitch. 

She does it on her own, without any prompting, not in apparent response to anything happening around her. Maya, feeling hopeful, badgers her for a while trying to get her to repeat it, but she doesn’t move again. 

For the next several hours, there’s no sign of anything that encouraging. The optimism Maya had been considering feeling has mostly subsided by the time the sun sets.

It’s late, and Maya’s considering going to sleep. She’s finished the novel and moved on to the pump repair manual, which is not that useful without an actual pump around. She glances over at Angel again, a habit by now, not expecting anything to be different, and realizes in the weak light from the single lamp that her eyes are open.

Maya freezes for a moment. She blinks and finds that yes, the image is the same, she’s not imagining it. Angel is awake and looking at her. She scrambles across the room, trying to move quickly but also not startle her, and drops to a kneel by the mattress.

“Hey,” she says, trying to sound calm and unalarming. “You awake?”

Angel makes no sound or movement, but her eyes move briefly from Maya’s face and look around the room, then back to her.

“Do you know where you are?” Maya asks.

No response. She blinks very slowly.

“Okay. You remember me?”

Still not making any noise, eyes not moving from Maya’s, she gives a tiny, mute nod. Then she closes her eyes again and lets out a long breath, and doesn’t blink or stir anymore.

_Wait,_ Maya wants to tell her, come back, don’t go back under, but she also knows that she probably needs rest or something and she shouldn’t disturb her any more than she already has. She lets the room fall back into silence, even though it feels like letting something vital slip away from her. She monitors Angel’s breathing. It’s steady. Maybe stronger than before, although it’s hard to tell.

Maya thinks to herself: _Well, she’s not dead._ That’s been the baseline for things going well so far, that Angel continues to not be dead. She might be dying, but not dead. Her waking just now seems like a good sign, but maybe sometimes people come out of comas right before they die, in that last rally the dying sometimes seem to get? Maya doesn’t know. She allows herself to think that it is a good sign.

If she’s improving enough to wake up, that means she’s getting better. Maya’s not sure at this point how much better she is capable of getting, what kind of permanent damage might have been inflicted on her brain between her near-death and the two days she’s spent out. She starts with what she knows: she’s not so far gone that she’s incapable of waking, as Maya had increasingly feared this morning. She knows who Maya is, so she’s at least got some memory or knowledge of things that happened to her. She can answer simple questions, which means she can still understand and process language. Moving further back to the basics: she can recognize a human face. She can see. These are all good things. Maya can’t take any of them for granted.

She ends up staying by the mattress with Angel in case something happens again. It doesn’t, but Maya waits just in case, until at some point she falls asleep on the floor, the lamp still on.

*

The next morning, Maya tries to wake her again. Angel won’t open her eyes this time, but she makes a small, incomprehensible noise in response to Maya’s voice. It’s the first time Maya’s heard her make a sound since getting here.

Maya tries to cajole her into opening her eyes again and she still won’t, but by the twitch of her eyebrows Maya thinks maybe she can hear her and is just being stubborn. Then she calls Roland.

“She woke up,” she reports. “She’s—not really staying awake, she’s in and out, but she woke up.”

“She did?” Roland sounds a little incredulous. Maya can’t say she blames him.

“Okay, I mean, she…wasn’t _super_ awake, she didn’t talk to me or anything. I don’t know how bad it is. But she was awake. She’s coming out of it.”

“You think she’s recovering, then?” says Roland.

“I do,” says Maya, very firmly, in case Angel’s still hearing her from the other room.

“Alright,” he says. “Listen, we’ve got our hands pretty full over here. People are losing their minds a little now that they know Jack’s dead and we’re trying to keep it organized. I…don’t actually know where Lilith is right now, so it might be a while before she can come get you. Can you two hang tight for a little while? See if she comes around any more.”

Throughout the day, Angel comes back in bits and pieces. She swims in and out of lucidity, mostly hazy, sometimes blinking or moving a limb or seeming to hear what Maya’s saying and sometimes not.

By the afternoon, there are periods where Maya can reliably get her to respond to yes or no questions with a nod. She sometimes makes small sounds in response, not forming any full words yet, but she seems like she might be trying. When she looks like she’s in one of her stretches of clearer awareness, Maya sits with her and gives it another try.

“Do you know where you are?” she asks again.

Angel shakes her head, or really just moves it weakly to one side. She mouths what might be _no,_ but doesn’t say it.

“We’re in a safehouse out in the Dust. Lilith zapped us here after you passed out.” Then, because she thinks she should know, she adds, “He’s dead.” She doesn’t quite know what to say— _He? Jack? Your dad?_

Angel doesn’t really react. Maya doesn’t know what she expected her to do, but she just blinks once, very slowly. Then she pulls her arm up to her face and buries her head in the inside of her elbow, and shuts her eyes again.

*

She’s starting to be able to form words again.

Maya has been running a continuous program of one-sided conversations with her, hoping that something she says will catch on with Angel and get some response, that maybe she’ll answer one of the many questions Maya throws out there without getting a reply to. 

Maya’s chattering, mostly to herself, about the three-headed skag that was supposedly sighted a ways away from here. Maya saw a three-header one time, or at least she thinks she did, it was from a moving car, so it was kind of hard to tell, but it makes for something to talk about. Angel’s got her eyes open, watching Maya from across the room, listening. Or at least looking like she’s listening. It’s hard to tell when she’s awake but isn’t present and when she’s got her eyes closed but is, so Maya just keeps talking whether or not she thinks anyone is hearing her. She’s stopped trying to guess whether anything she’s saying is getting through at any particular moment, so she’s not really expecting it when she pauses rambling for a moment and she hears a noise from Angel.

She makes a sound that’s not clearing her throat, more like confirming that it still works. She pushes air up without any syllables for a few seconds as she makes the first few runs at the word. After a few tries, she squeezes out, creakily, “You.”

Maya has dropped her previous train of thought entirely, but she answers as casually as if she’s continuing the normal conversation that they’ve been having this whole time. “Yeah? Me?” she says.

Angel doesn’t continue the thought.

*

She progresses to being able to put together full sentences. The first question she asks Maya is, “What happened?” Her voice is raspy and weak. “How long have I been here?”

“About three days,” says Maya. “You were out real bad. Thought you might not make it for a little while.”

Angel is sluggish to respond, looking at her own hand instead of at Maya and blinking at it like she doesn’t understand it. “I’m not dead,” she murmurs unhappily. “I was supposed to die.” Her hand goes to the side of her head, where the two neural interface ports are. “What happened?” she asks again.

“Not sure,” says Maya. “But you’re here now, aren’t you?”

*

“We’ll get you back to Sanctuary,” Maya tells her a little later. “Just hold on a few hours.”

Angel’s slid back into silence for a while, but this gets her attention. “What?” she says. “No, not…you can’t take me there.” Her speech is slow, still somewhat disoriented, but clearly distressed.

Well, that’s not what Maya expected. “What do you mean I can’t take you there?” she says.

“I…can’t. I can’t go there. I can’t be there.” Angel doesn’t look at Maya, but she frowns weakly at the floor, unfocused.

“What, you just want to stay out here, then? Come on. We’ll get you back to civilization. It’ll be nice.”

“I can’t,” Angel mutters. Her shoulder twitches a little. Her eyes are wide open now, but her enunciation, which has been getting clearer over the day, is now sliding back into a mumbly drunkenness. “Please. Don’t.”

“Alright, alright,” says Maya. “Didn’t mean to upset you. You can stay in this grimy little shack as long as you want, if that’s what you prefer.”

Angel seems to relax a little at that, or at least her breathing sounds less like she’s sliding toward a panic attack. Maya doesn’t say anything else for a while, lest she somehow offend Angel again by offering to improve her situation, and instead flips the radio onto some dreampop station at the lowest volume to fill the silence.

*

“What do you _mean_ she doesn’t want to come here?” says Lilith.

“I don’t know,” says Maya. “She seemed really against it, though. Haven’t seen her that upset about anything the whole time she’s been awake.”

“Okay. Fine. So you want me to come get her anyway or what?”

Maya thinks about it for a moment. “No,” she says, “leave us here for now.”

Lilith sighs. She sounds tired, even through the flattened sound of the ECHO line. “Look, shit’s gotten crazy over here. People think the damn world’s ending because one rich idiot got himself shot. I’m running around like crazy trying to keep things together, and I can’t keep hopping back and forth between here and there if you two are gonna stay in my little desert vacation home.”

“You don’t have to, then. Leave her with me. I can take it from here.”

“…Really?” Lilith sounds somewhat doubtful. “You want me to leave you out there by yourself?”

“There’s two of us. We’ll figure it out,” says Maya. I’ll deal with…all of this. Just bring me a car or something so we’re not stuck out here. That’s the last thing I’ll ask from you.”

Lilith thinks about it for a minute. “Well, alright! If you insist,” she says. “I’m officially turning the responsibility for this over to you, then. If she dies, that’s not on me.” There’s a variety of clunking sounds and someone speaking indistinctly on the other end of the line. “Hey—gimme a sec, I’m on a call—” Lilith calls away from the receiver, then turns back to Maya. “Yeah, I’ll get you a car,” she says. “As far as I know me and Roland are the only ones who know where you two are, so no one should come looking for you just yet. Hopefully stuff will calm down here in…I don’t know. However long it takes. Let me know how things work out.”

Maya’s stepped outside to make the call, and after she hangs up, she waits for a moment, listening to bugs chirring to each other in the dark. The moon is a skinny crescent, she thinks a waxing one. She draws in one more breath of desert air, going cool in the evening, and then goes back inside.


	3. Chapter 3

Maya’s had a more precise handle on time since she arrived on Pandora. Her routine has become more dependent on people who actually wear watches, and for the first time she’s developed a more rigid sense for the segments of hours, how long it takes to move from one action to the next.

Out here, it begins to slip away again. Time turns liquid when you have nothing to do. The hours aren’t chopped up, the days just run into each other, swaying back and forth between day and evening, stars and dawn. Noon is the same as morning, which isn’t much different from night. It was the same way on Athenas, where everything between sunrise and sunset blended together without markers. Things fall into a clockless tempo that oozes along unflagging.

The rhythm is slightly different here, where the day is ruled by the late afternoon instead of sunset. The peak of the day, when the heat gets its most unbearable, is the axis time centers around. The heat can be felt as a pressure that builds in the morning and sighs out at night, a gathering up and a letting out of breath, a long respiration.

Even the hot point of high noon often seems far away now, dulled down to nothing under the dark of the tin roof. Angel learns to sit up again. In the distance, over the horizon, the rest of the world churns and turns over, knocked off its balance and lurching towards a new direction.

*

Angel seems to be through the worst of the eridium withdrawal. She’s awake full-time now, or at least not lapsing back into unconsciousness. She sleeps frequently and in irregular intervals. When she’s awake, she’s often sullen or dazed, and she sometimes just lies on the mattress, not unconscious but apparently just unwilling to move.

But she speaks now. She’s irritable or listless a lot of the time, but she can carry on a conversation, and when she doesn’t respond, Maya knows it’s because she doesn’t want to and not because she might be dying.

She goes through a spell of random vomiting that lasts for a few days, then subsides. The tremors lessen as well. Her sleeping patterns remain erratic, and follow no clear schedule or reason. Maya hears her stirring in the middle of the night and finds her dead asleep in the middle of the afternoon. She slides between waking and sleeping every few hours, apparently unable to stand being in either state for too long. When she wakes she occasionally seems confused, momentarily frantic, like she doesn’t yet remember where she is or how she got there. 

Maya realizes it must be the first time she’s woken up anywhere other than in the core in who knows how many years. There’s always that initial moment of disorientation on waking up after sleeping somewhere unfamiliar, the feeling that something is off that happens in the minute before your memory catches up with you. Maya imagines it must be like that but multiplied impossibly. Did she even sleep when she was in there?

Maya asks her one morning, when she’s in what seems to be one of her better moods.

“It…wasn’t really like that,” Angel says. “The way your brain works when you’re in there, there isn’t really sleeping. I would temporarily go into a dormant mode when there were no active demands on my system for a while. But I didn’t sleep, no.” She blinks, one of those weird long blinks she does, like she’s consulting something written on the back of her eyelids. “It feels strange. I’m trying to get used to it again.”

However many years and not a minute of sleep. Maya doesn’t know what that would feel like, other than exhausting. It sounds like it was probably horrible, but Maya doesn’t think it’ll do Angel any good to say that to her, so she just stays quiet.

*

“Can I ask you something?” Angel says later.

It’s the first time since their initial exchange after her waking that Angel’s asked Maya a question rather than the other way around. “Sure,” says Maya.

Angel pinches one thumb absently between the fingers of her other hand. “Is he really dead?”

“Yes, he is,” says Maya. “What, you think I’d lie to you about that?”

Angel twists her fingers around each other. “No, I—I just thought…I was barely awake when you told me. I thought maybe I imagined it, or told it to myself, or something.” She pauses. “Are you…absolutely sure? There’s definitely no way he’s still alive?”

“Well, I was the one to shoot him,” says Maya. “So yes, you have my guarantee, straight from the horse’s mouth. He’s dead.”

Something difficult to read passes over Angel’s face. Her eyebrow quivers, and she actually turns her face to look at Maya. “You?” she says.

“Yeah,” says Maya. She doesn’t know what you’re meant to say in a conversation like this. _Yes, I shot your father, and I didn’t really think about it that much._ After all the rigamarole of getting there, it had been very quick and so simple, just a twitch of Maya’s hand between the planet’s biggest headache being alive and being dead and out of everyone’s hair.

“I see,” says Angel. Her face has fallen back to its regular blankness. Then she says, “I should thank you, I guess.” Maya thinks she means it, but it’s hard to tell.

*

A week after waking, Angel can walk a little ways.

She can make it from the mattress to the couch in the other room without Maya’s help now. It’s a pretty good improvement, which Maya points out to Angel. Angel gives her a noncommittal _hmm_ in response.

“You could probably try to go a little farther now that you’ve got the hang of it,” Maya suggests.

“Farther where?” says Angel. “It’s not like there’s much more room in here.”

“Well,” says Maya, “you could try going outside.”

Angel looks at her askance. “Why?”

_Why?_ What kind of question— “I don’t know, fresh air?” says Maya. “Not sitting in the dark all day?”

“Right now?”

“Sure. Why not?”

Angel stares at Maya, then looks at the floor, then back at Maya. “…Okay,” she says. She stands, slowly, and makes her way to the door. Maya knows she can walk quicker than that. Maybe she couldn’t a few days ago, but she can now. She has to be dragging her feet on purpose.

Maya opens the door for her, and feels the heat from outside roll in. The view through the doorframe is a rectangle of flat dirt, bright in the full sun of the outdoors. Maya’s been in and out several times a day, but Angel hasn’t gone through this door since arriving here.

Maya steps over the threshold, and after a moment of hesitation, Angel steps after her. 

It’s late afternoon. The sun bounces harsh off every surface, sharp on the eyes after coming right from inside. Maya squints and allows the bright splotches to pop in her vision while her eyes adjust. Next to her, Angel turns her head slowly, taking in the expanse around them, and then looking up at the sky.

Maya takes another few steps out, but Angel doesn’t follow her. When she turns, Angel has stopped just outside the door. She looks like she might be staring directly into the sun. “Hey,” says Maya.

A slight breeze tousles Maya’s hair. Angel looks like it might knock her over. “What’s up?” Maya says.

“I don’t know. I don’t—I don’t know what’s wrong,” says Angel. She looks at the ground and shudders in a breath. She keeps balling and unballing her fists. “Never mind. I can’t do this. I think I need to lie back down.”

“Alright,” says Maya, and sweeps her back inside, one arm hovering behind her just in case, because she does look a little like she might pass out.

As soon as they’re back in the cool dark and Maya closes the door, Angel lets out a breath she must have been holding. She all but collapses back on the couch and puts her head in her hands.

“I’m sorry,” she says after a minute.

Maya looks over at her, lit faintly in the sunlight leaking in between the window boards, her hair falling over most of her face.

“For what?” says Maya.

“Whatever that was. I don’t know.”

Maya considers her another moment. “That’s alright. Pretty hot out there. Some people don’t take well to it, they get all faint in the sun.” 

Angel huffs out a quiet _huh_ under her breath, as if Maya’s excuse is laughable even to her. “Sure,” she says, and sinks back into the couch for the next few hours.

*

They make a second pass at it the next morning. The sun isn’t as relentless this early, and it’s cloudier today. When they step outside, everything has a slightly duller cast to it, not as aggressively lit up as yesterday.

Angel makes it a few feet out, but her strides get slower as she gets farther from the door, and she comes to a stop again. Maya keeps a closer eye on her this time, trying to figure out where the hesitation happens, what prompts it.

Angel holds in her spot, not moving, not saying anything. Maya looks out in the same direction she’s looking, wanting to see whatever it is Angel sees that has her frozen like this. It’s just empty horizon. The silhouette of a bird makes its way across the sky maybe half a mile away, but nothing else in the scene in front of them moves or stands out. 

Angel keeps it together for a moment longer, then shakes her head and says, “No, I can’t, I—”

She spins around and stumbles back inside. Maya follows.

She gives Angel a few minutes on the couch until it seems like she’s collected herself a bit. Then she asks, “What is it? It’s not really the heat, is it? It’s not really that much hotter out there than it is in here.”

“I’m sorry,” mutters Angel.

“I’m not mad about it,” says Maya. “I just want to know what it is.”

Angel sighs. “No,” she says, “it’s not the heat.”

“It wasn’t like this when you first started walking. You were weak on your feet, but it wasn’t like this. It must be something else.”

Angel looks over at the window, where the slivers of light still press through. “It’s just…a lot,” she says. “Being in here is one thing, but then going out there, there’s just…so much of it. Everything stretches out so far in every direction and I don’t know where to look.” She gives a short, dry laugh. “And there’s no interface or anything anymore, I just… _look_ at things. Everything feels so bare. It’s too big and too empty. Nothing feels right.”

She closes her eyes. “I wanted—for so long. I wanted to see the sun again. And now here it is, and I can’t even do it.”

They wait a day before trying again. Inside the house, Angel moves around more. She clunks around in a pair of boots Maya picked up that are a bit too big for her. She often carries the radio around with her from the back room to the front, from the front to the back. When she comes to a rest, she sits on the floor and scans the stations for several hours at a stretch. 

Maya listens too, sometimes. She can’t discern anything about Angel’s taste in music with the way she hops between every station equally, but she does seems to like the news broadcasts. She’ll stop on them for a long time, listening intently. The official Hyperion-sponsored channels are the most strident and the most consistently on the air, but Angel also listens to the irregular broadcasts from Sanctuary, the conspiracy radio from loners with long-range broadcasting equipment set up at unregistered points out in the desert, even the mobile bandit radio rigs that loop in and out of range as their hosts rove across the landscape.

In the late afternoon, it’s one of the Hyperion stations again. This time it’s one of the space-filler voices that comes on between the more popular personalities, no one big enough to introduce themselves by name. Over the past two weeks, the network appears to have solidified an internal policy on discussing Jack’s death, which is that they don’t talk about it or any related subjects. It makes for pretty dull listening, as there’s not a lot left that they can report on. Today the best they’ve managed to pick up is the murder of three senior construction managers outside Opportunity.

“Do you really want to listen to that stuff?” says Maya as the voice segues into an ad read. “You must know most of it’s not true, don’t you?”

“Of course I know,” says Angel. “But I like to know what’s going on. It’s just one data stream. You can make extrapolations from it that aren’t what it’s directly telling you. And then you combine it with whatever you’re getting from your other inputs, and when you put the patterns together it can tell you pieces about what you can’t see.”

“If you want to know what’s going on, why don’t you let me take you back to Sanctuary? You can actually see what’s happening there, you know, not have to piece it together from a distance.” Maya thinks maybe Angel will be more amenable to the idea now that she’s been awake for a while and has more idea of where she actually is, which is to say a place without electrical outlets or air conditioning.

But Angel tightens her jaw. “I can’t. I told you that, didn’t I?” She sounds genuinely unsure about whether she spoke this to Maya out loud or just thought it at her while in a state of delirium. 

“You did. Didn’t say why.”

Angel bites her lip. “Because—I—I’m an extension of Jack. I was his medium to this planet. I’m the closest thing to Jack that isn’t _him_. The people there would hate me just as much as they do him if they understood what I was. I can’t show my face there. They’d be justified in wanting me dead, too, I tried to blow up their city, can you imagine if I thought I could just stroll in after that?”

“It’s not like that was _your_ idea. I recall you seemed pretty reluctant about it even at the time. Besides, the place is still standing, isn’t it? Floating. Whatever. No harm, no foul.”

“Well, _you _can say that. I think you’d feel differently if you lived there. Those people would be out for my blood if they knew who I was.”__

__Maya wants to say that it’s not true, she’ll be fine there, but deep down she feels that yeah, Angel might be right. “We’ll figure something out,” she says. “It’s not like people there know what you look like. Pretty sure the average citizen has no idea you exist anyway, and if they do they think you’re an AI.”_ _

__Angel shakes her head. “No. I can’t,” she says. Maya leaves it, and they don’t discuss it again._ _

__They sally out into the sunlight for a third time the next day. Angel does markedly better this time; she extends her record from her last run by a good minute or so. Lilith has left them a car, as promised, a sturdy little outrunner she’s left parked a dozen yards or so from the door. Angel makes her way over to it, slowly, stepping deliberately, with Maya tagging along a pace behind. When she reaches it, she lays one hand on the sideview mirror and draws in a big breath, as if recollecting herself after something tremendous. Then she turns around and walks the same path right back to the door._ _

__“I don’t know what it is,” she tells Maya once they’re back inside. “I just get dizzy, and…I don’t know what it is I’m expecting. I just feel like something bad is going to happen whenever I’m out there.”_ _

__Maya has always been uncertain about what’s going on in other people’s heads even at the best of times, when they should be easy to read. This is not one of those moments when the important parts are transparent. Even for a better people-reader than Maya, there are things that even a good observer can’t pick up because the signal is confused before it even goes out. Some things are so personal they become inexplicable. Sometimes your reaction to things gets squeezed through a tangle of whatever you’ve got inside you that you don’t understand the structure of, and it comes out twisted up in a way that doesn’t make sense, either to the self or to others. And yet something about what Angels says strikes at something familiar. “Like someone knows, when you’re out there?” she says. “Like you’re going to get in trouble for it?”_ _

__Angel frowns at her, paying more attention now. “…Yes,” she says._ _

__Maya remembers when she’d first left the abbey. The first few hours after she’d bolted had felt like a rush, and then the thrill had started to wear off. She’d started to think she might have made a mistake, but she couldn’t exactly go back after that. For her first couple of weeks on the outside, she’d felt a persistent, low-level panic. Something was going to happen to her for disobeying. Someone was going to come for her. But either they didn’t know where she had gone or they were afraid to find her, because no one had come._ _

__She had gone down the mountain and just kept walking until she couldn’t anymore. She was headed south—she knew there was another town out that way after about fifty miles of dry, stony foothills—but she had never walked more than a mile in a straight line, having always had to loop in a circular track around the grounds if she wanted to exercise, and had no understanding of how far that was to travel. She had left with no money, no car, and no coat._ _

__She’d had the dumb luck to eventually stumble across the path of a supply truck on the single road through the area. She had a stolen pistol and a reputation that preceded her, so even without any experience in hijackings, it was fairly easy for her to threaten her way to the town of Cobalt Pass, the spot where she’d first sunk her teeth into the world. She had found, in many ways, that the taste was different from what she’d expected. The fear had been one of them. Maya had rarely been afraid in the life she’d lived before leaving, which she suspects is something that differentiates her breakout from Angel’s. It was something she’d had to learn._ _

__Maya doesn’t like to say _I understand_ unless she knows it’s true. Right now she doesn’t. “It’s a very wide sky out there,” is what she tells Angel instead. “There’s a lot of room for dread out in the open.”_ _

____

*

Maya’s knocked a couple of the boards out of the tops of the window over the past few days. It’s not like they were keeping the bugs out, and there’s no rain to speak of, so she might as well let some more light in. Angel has spent the last few hours sleeping through the afternoon in the other room, and Maya’s decided that if she takes just one more board off, it will strike a good balance between getting a nice cross-breeze and making sure no large wildlife can crawl through and bite one of them on the face in the middle of the night.

“Maya?” she hears from the doorway.

“Hm?” Maya turns. Angel usually isn’t in the habit of informing Maya when she gets up or goes to sleep, as she still does so in intermittent and arbitrary episodes. Maya had gotten used to the low light conditions of the early days of their residence here, so Angel’s face looks uncommonly distinct in the now more abundant sunlight. She looks somewhat harrowed.

“Something strange happened,” says Angel. “I think I dreamed.”

Maya doesn’t understand if that’s supposed to mean something to her, but Angel looks shaken by it, so she says, “…About what?’

“I…I don’t know. It was nothing in particular. Nothing that made that much sense.”

“Must have been _something_ , for you to come out here.”

“It was just…I was back in the core.” Angel speaks slowly. “I’d never left. The person who I was in the dream didn’t know that leaving was possible. There was something going wrong, somewhere. I didn’t know what the problem was, or…what it was kept changing. He was yelling at me about it, and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it, or nothing I did worked to change anything.” She blinks rapidly a few times. “And…then I woke up?”

As she talks, her tone becomes less distant and confused, and she shakes her head. “Okay, I’m sorry, I—this is stupid, I know what a dream is, I’ve had dreams before. I just—I’m not used to it. I haven’t done it in a very long time. I…forgot what it feels like, having to wake up and remember it isn’t real.”

“Oh. Have you not been dreaming, then, before this?” Maya asks. “I mean, I know you said you didn’t sleep when you were in there, but since you got out?”

“No.”

“Not at all? Not ever? Even when you were sort-of-comatose?”

“I don’t remember much of that. But I don’t think there was anything then, either. There’s been nothing until now.” Angel sighs. “I guess it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal now that I’m more awake. I just…freaked out when I woke up. I didn’t entirely remember how you have to reorient yourself to the real world.” She tilts her head. “I didn’t deal with anything that wasn’t real for a very long time. You know, all data and video feeds and things like that. And now it’s this.”

“And what is ‘this?’” says Maya.

“I don’t know. Being here, in this place. Going outside for ten seconds at a time and then falling to pieces because the wind blew on me the wrong way.” She glances over at the door, like the outside world might hear her talking about it behind its back. “None of this feels real either, sometimes. A lot of the time. I feel like this can’t be my life, like any minute it’s all going to fall apart and I’ll be back in the there, and this will all have been—” she waves her hand indistinctly at the air.

“What, a dream?” says Maya. “You think this is the best your brain could come up with if you were dreaming, just sitting in a shack with me for a very long time? Not even with the walls melting or your teeth falling out or anything?”

Angel gives her a little weak smile. “It’s not quite like that. Not the same kind of not-real. In a dream, it’s—everything’s wrong, but you don’t realize how it doesn’t make sense, and everything feels more real than it should. And out here, everything’s plausible enough, but it just feels…like it’s not fully happening.” She sighs again. “Better than my teeth falling out, though, I suppose. Anyway. I feel a little stupid now. Sorry to bother you.”

“It’s fine.” Maya gestures at where she’s pried one nail partway out of the window frame. “Not like I was doing anything that thrilling over here anyway.”

Angel disappears back into the other room, and Maya turns her attention back to the window. She’s been working with the tools she has available to her, which are a flathead screwdriver for prying things and on hammering things, occasionally substituting the butt of her shotgun for the latter. It’s an inefficient process that leaves her with a lot of splinters in her hands. That’s fine. She’s got nothing but time.

All those years, she thinks? And not a single dream?

What a strange thing to lose. What a strange thing to get back, after so long. Maya wonders what it signifies. There must be something going on there, in her brain, under the surface. Something is going through some remodeling. Some tendrils of neurons are shaping into new webs, and the shift is tiny, but it sends up ripples that make it visible.

Any mid-level AI can dream, if you want to make it. They figured that trick out a long time ago. Certain philosophically-inclined tech circles would argue about it, whether whatever neural net-induced distortion a network can put itself through is _really_ dreaming, but the concept is close enough. It’s more of a novelty thing these days anyway. There would be no purpose in having the nexus of a large corporate network periodically go through an exercise in processing nonsense data in nonsense ways. A company computer doesn’t dream. Even a mouse that’s made its way into the server room to ruin the cables has the privilege of dreaming. Every breathing mammal does. But for the network, and the brain suspended in its midst, there’s nothing but the the practicality in the dim blankness of low-power mode.

*

Maya dips into the room with the mattress, which she’s begun to consider to sort of be Angel’s room, to see if she’s awake. She finds her sitting on the floor with something in her hands, and she freezes when she catches sight of Maya.

Maya leans over, trying to get a look at what Angel’s doing. “Is that my ECHO?” she says.

Angel looks like a complete deer in headlights. Maya’s not sure why, since she hardly has anything interesting or personal on there to snoop through. Even so, Angel has a look like she’s just been caught midway through the commission of a felony.

“I wasn’t—I just wanted to see, I wasn’t trying anything—” she puts the device down in the kind of slow and carefully visible way that someone might lay down their weapon during a hostage negotiation. “I just…wanted to see if I could interface with it. I’ve tried with the radio, and even with the lamp, but I couldn’t get anything, and—I just wanted to try—I couldn’t even do anything, anyway. There’s nothing there anymore.”

Maya starts to say something, but Angel says “Here—” and pushes it back towards her, then slips away to the other room.

Maya picks it up off the floor. “You know,” she calls through the doorway, “if you wanted to see it, you could have just asked,” but Angel doesn’t answer. Maya sticks the ECHO back in her pocket.

The next day, Angel’s in a mood. She has these kinds of days often enough that Maya can tell early on when it’s in the air. She sleeps, or at least lies there with her eyes closed, for the whole morning. By noon she’s clearly awake, but doesn’t move from the mattress. Maya leaves her alone for some time to give her a chance to sort herself out, but after a while she gets too impatient not to intervene.

“Hey,” she says to Angel, hanging over the mattress. “You should probably get up at some point.”

Angel reluctantly turns to look at her. “What time is it?” She laughs humorlessly to herself. “What time is it. I never used to have to ask that.”

“It’s 2:23. Come on, get up, let’s go out.”

“Don’t want to.”

“Okay. What _do_ you want to do, then?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. I want to sleep, but I slept too much and now I can’t anymore, and there’s nothing else I can do where I don’t have to think.” Angel turns her face into the thin, discolored sheet. “Why couldn’t you have just let me die back there?”

Maya shuts her eyes and exhales through her nose. “Please don’t say that,” she says.

Angel doesn’t say anything more to that. Maya has nothing either, and she disappears the way she came.

Angel seems to have righted herself by the next day, or at least she doesn’t mention it again. She spends the morning quiet, but not despondent. Around noon, outside, she makes it around to the far side of the car.

She sticks close to the body of the vehicle as she sidles around it. It hardly adds a lot to the lap she made last time to go a few extra feet around the hood, but Maya can see why Angel hesitates as she comes around the passenger side. The car provides a point of cover; on the near side of it, she’s sheltered between its side and the refuge of the house. On the other side there’s nothing, no more barrier between her and the rest of the world.

She makes the whole circuit herself, without any prompting from Maya and without a word spoken. She doesn’t say anything when they get back inside, either, just flits through the doorway to be alone again.

*

Maya feels like she shouldn’t bring it up, because Angel seemed so upset by it before. But she’s curious, and besides, if it’s true, she can’t just ignore something that important. So she waits a few days, and then she asks about it.

“So,” she says. “Your powers. You think they’re gone?”

Angel doesn’t answer at first.

“What did you mean, when you said there’s nothing there?” Maya says.

She thinks maybe Angel is giving her the silent treatment, and she’ll have to circle back around to this one, but then she speaks. “I just…I try and I don’t feel anything. I talk and nothing answers.” Angel looks at Maya. “I know yours are different, but you must know what it feels like when you’re using them, and it feels like…you’re reaching for something, and you’re used to it being right there, and you can touch it without thinking about it. Only now everything is gone.” She does look upset now. Dammit, Maya’s done it again. Should have known better. “I didn’t even know that could happen.”

“It’s not common,” says Maya. “But there are a handful of accounts of varying reliability over the past couple hundred years of Sirens losing their abilities. There was Katja Nikora, who lost hers after a head injury. And there was some actor’s wife out in Thrace, can’t remember her name, but she got some kind of experimental neural implant that burned her brain out so bad she could never read minds again.

Angel looks slightly dismayed. “You think I have brain damage, then?”

“I mean, you could. It’s not out of the realm of possibility. Maybe coming off the eridium scrambled you somehow, or maybe you just hit your head real hard when you passed out, who knows. But I was thinking, too, and it could be something else.” Angel gives her a look of reluctant intrigue, so she continues. “You were hooked up to the Hyperion systems for a very long time, I assume?”

“Yes.”

“And how long had you known you were a Siren before that?”

“Not very long. It showed up when I was eight, and I went in not long after that. A couple months, maybe.”

“And you’re how old now?”

“Nineteen.”

Maya nods. “Yeah. That’s a big chunk of time. If there is a critical period, I assume that would be it.”

There’s real curiosity on Angel’s face now, at that. “A critical period for what?”

Maya taps her fingers against her knee. “There’s…a lot of theorizing about Sirens, and not a lot of certainties. Not a big sample size, you know. It’s bad for science. So people throw a lot of hypotheses around and no one ever figures out if they’re true or not. You must know the type.”

“Sure.”

“Well, I was reading this thing by one of these theory guys, once. He was all interested in how the abilities express themselves differently in different individuals, and why we don’t all just have the same set of powers. And he had this theory about how your environment influences how your abilities develop. Like what your needs are at the time, what the world you interact with is like, what your fears are and what’s going on in your life, you turn out with abilities that reflect that. He didn’t know if it shaped, like, your whole deal, like what the nature of what you can do is or whether that’s already set and it’s just the finer points of how it comes out. But either way he thought there was a period where everything gets kind of…set. Like how kids learn their first language without trying when they’re little, and then they’re never that good at learning a language again. It would probably be in the first couple years of when you’re learning to use them, whatever age that happens to be at.”

Angel’s frowning at her. Maya takes it for confusion, and rambles more.

“When I was little and I was first figuring out how my whole thing worked, I went around using it on all kinds of things, picking up bugs and rocks and leaves and stuff before I had enough of a handle on it to move on to bigger things like people. But if I’d been stuck in a room where the only thing I had to interact with was bugs, maybe I never would have learned to lift anything other than a bug. And you barely ever got a chance to use yours on anything that wasn’t part of that specific module of the Hyperion network, right? So I was thinking. Maybe yours developed around the framework of the system you were connected to, and they got so specialized for it that they don’t work outside it anymore.”

Angel knits her brow deeper. “So you think it’s just…all gone for me now that I’m out?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a thought. It was an old text, and the author was just guessing, he probably never even met a real Siren. I don’t know what it would mean for you, even if it’s true.”

Angel is quiet for a while. Then she asks, “Do you think it’s ever going to come back?”

Maya sighs. “I’ve…never heard of anything like that happening before. Then again, I’ve never really heard of a situation like yours either.” Angel turns her head, failing to hide the crushed look that comes across her face.

A stab of sympathy goes at Maya’s heart. “A couple weeks ago I thought you might die on that mattress,” she says, trying to gently readjust Angel’s expectations. “Just being alive and walking around with most of a functioning brain is pretty good. If you managed to get out with everything intact other than this one part, I would consider yourself pretty lucky.”

Angel looks down at her fingers, at the wide bands of blue that wrap around the knuckles. “Maybe,” she says.


	4. Chapter 4

They work their way up to walking in a circle around the house. It becomes part of a routine: every day they make a circuit or two around the shack. The schedule is unfixed, and it rarely happens at the same time from day to day, floating between afternoon and morning depending on when Angel wakes up. The time isn’t important; just the doing. It’s a marker, something to hang the day on.

Eventually it turns easier for Angel. She walks more naturally, without freezing or dragging herself. Sometimes they go in silence, and sometimes they talk. Maya doesn’t have to do so much prodding now to get Angel to speak. She’ll participate in a conversation, and she’ll sometimes even say what’s on her mind unprompted.

Today has a feeling like it’s going to be a quiet round. That’s fine too. Maya’s okay with quiet. The air here is thick enough with its own heat that it doesn’t feel like emptiness to walk in silence. The atmosphere has its own presence. There’s no room for anything to be insufficient.

When they round the back wall, Angel says, “I want to say that I’m sorry.”

“For what?” says Maya.

“For what I was like when I met you.” Angel kicks a pebble—without breaking stride, Maya notices, still aware to little feats of motor coordination that would have been a struggle a few weeks ago. “I didn’t want to deceive you, or lead you into danger, or…any of the things I did.”

Maya snorts. “You want to apologize for putting me in _danger?_ Please. What are you, my chaperone to the school dance? I can handle myself.” She glances at Angel, who’s looking at the ground. “Besides, I wasn’t expecting an apology. I don’t get the sense that you were enjoying it.”

“Of course I wasn’t!” Angel catches herself, lowers her voice. “But that doesn’t matter, because I did it, even if I didn’t want to, I did it anyway. I just—I spent a very long time lying to you, and I thought I should say something.”

“Well, you didn’t have to. But if you want to anyway, then alright, consider the apology accepted.”

There’s a silence, and then as they come around the corner for their third loop, Maya says, “If we’re apologizing for things, then I should probably say I’m sorry for trying to kill you.”

“That’s not the same. That was—I asked you to do that. It was what I wanted.”

“Well, then it seems like both of us were doing our best with what we had at the time, then,” says Maya. “Still, it was a bad impression to make, I would say, for our first meeting. So: I’m sorry.”

“Alright,” says Angel after a moment. “Then…I accept your apology too, I guess. Is that what you’re supposed to say when someone says they’re sorry?”

“Not really sure,” says Maya. “It seems like it. Works for me.”

Angel nods. They come back around to the door and pass back inside.

*

In the morning, Angel comes over to the couch where she’d left the radio last night, the sheet pulled off the mattress and wrapped around her like a kid dressed as a ghost. She picks it up, turns it on, and listens on low volume for about twenty seconds. Then she turns it off again and sits back, hugging the little plastic box to her chest.

Maya looks up from where she’s deconstructing a crate that used to hold pieces of loose hardware. “Not a fan of country music?” she says.

Angel appears to either ignore her or not hear her for a few seconds. Then she says, “Last night I dreamed about something else.”

Maya stacks one stray washer on top of a second matching one. “Something else?”

“Not the core, for the first time. I was in a house.” She frowns and then revises. “Or, I don’t know if it was _me_. It was something like me. Or something, or someone, that I was standing in the place of, holding their point of view. Does that make sense?”

“Not at all,” says Maya amiably. “But go on.”

“It was a real house. Not like this one. A real house, with glass windows and a refrigerator and security cameras. And I was alone. Or whoever it was. We were alone.”

Angel speaks in a high, thin, distant tone. “I was walking through, looking around, trying to figure out what kind of place this was. There were _things_ all over the place, stuff that people had left around. Mountains of it. Personal effects. Furniture. But there was so much of it and it was piled so high that I couldn’t remember what a single object was.”

She leans forward. Her hair falls like a black curtain beside her face. “If I looked out the windows, it was nothing. I was nowhere. I was walking through the rooms, trying to make sense of why I was there, but the house kept changing. I’d go back and the room I’d left would be a different one from before, with different furniture and different detritus. And I just kept walking. I didn’t know how big the house was, or if it had an end. And then I woke up before I could figure out what the point was.”

“Well, that’s how all dreams are,” says Maya. “It’s not like there’s an ending with credits. You just wake up halfway through some shit that doesn’t make sense, and then it goes away, and you realize it doesn’t matter.”

“I’m not sure I like that,” Angel says. “It should mean something, shouldn’t it? Shouldn’t it be _for_ something?”

Maya wiggles a loose staple from the crate and drops it on top of the pair of washers. “Not everything has to be for something, you know.”

*

It doesn’t escape Maya’s notice that Angel is getting bored. Maya tries giving her things to read, but Angel gets quickly frustrated with how long it takes—she can’t seem to manage the bottleneck of having to process information manually, word-by-word. She tries teaching her to meditate, which she also hates. But she doesn’t actually say anything about it until one afternoon, when it must finally build up too far.

Maya can tell she’s getting restless from the other side of the room. She flips through the radio stations more quickly than usual. Listens to a few seconds. Clicks the dial. Three seconds. Next. Four seconds. Next. Two. Next. She keeps going even after she’s gone in a circle and rolled back to one of the earlier ones again.

She finally sees Maya watching her and blurts out, “How do you do it? Does everyone have to live like this?”

“In a little shack in the desert? No, not most people.”

“No. I don’t mean that. I mean—” she passes her hand in front of her eyes. “Only having what’s right in front of you. And then that’s it. There’s no information stream around you, nothing to monitor, nothing to— _do_. No objective or task or anything. There used to be a hundred things happening in a hundred places, all the time. Now all there is is the here and now, and me, that’s it.” She looks almost pleadingly at Maya. “Doesn’t it bother you? There not being any more than _you_? Don’t you feel like you’re missing something going on out of your sight?”

“I wouldn’t know, would I? I’ve never had anything more than just me.”

Angel makes that shifting motion she does every few minutes, always adjusting herself where she’s sitting, like she can’t quite get comfortable in her own frame. “When I was in there, it’s like I used to be above a big open canyon where I could see for miles. And I could see every tree, every bird, every little insect that moved. There were countless things there, living and growing, and I could see how it all moved and how it all fit together. And now that I’m out, it’s like I went from that to being suddenly trapped in one tiny room with no windows.”

“Not _literally_ , I don’t mean this actual place,” she says when Maya starts to say something. “I mean that’s what being only a body is like. I mean, I _had_ a body, but it wasn’t…where I was, really. And now that it’s all I am, it feels…so clumsy. So limited. I look down at my hands and I’m like, oh, this is it? This is where I end? It feels like I’ve been truncated. Something’s been cut short before it should have.”

Maya tilts her head. “You’re only the same thing you’ve been your whole life,” she says.

Angel sighs and twists her hands together. “Forget it. You wouldn’t understand.”

*

Maya comes back from a supply run with her gift. “Here, catch,” she says, lobbing it underhand at Angel.

Angel fumbles with it and then looks down, blinking at the ECHO in her hands. “This isn’t yours,” she says.

“Nope,” says Maya, “this one’s yours. Thought you should have one. That way you won’t have to steal mine.”

Angel looks guiltier at that than Maya had intended. “What am I supposed to do with this?” she says. “I can’t talk to it anymore.”

“You know, regular people use these too, and they manage to do it fine without any kind of powers. I’m sure you can get some kind of use out of it.”

Maya leaves her with it, and as she turns, she catches Angel daring to look at it curiously: the bright LCDs of the screen waking up under her touch, that periscope to the rest of the world.

Maya remembers her own first brush with the interplanetary internet and how world-broadening it had felt. It had stalled her on Athenas for several months, actually. She’d intended when she first left the abbey to get off-planet and out of dodge right away, and then she had discovered this new world that didn’t live on any planet and was bigger than any astronomical body could hold. For a while it had seemed like she didn’t have to go anywhere else, it was all right here with her now. It was knowledge in a dosage she had never experienced in her life: information on anything you could want, and all of it accessible near-instantly. You didn’t have to spend hours hunting for book then index then page and then maybe not even find what you were looking for, you just seemed to practically speak it and it appeared. She’d been kind of immobilized for a while by the rush of that, drunk on it.

She scarfed down knowledge like they were serving unlimited breadsticks. She read and read and read, and she learned a lot of things in that time, about military history and biology and which actors people thought were hot and which actors people were mad at. She drank it up breathlessly. But even when her eyes hurt from spending all night staring at tiny fonts, even cross-referencing a dozen orbiting tabs and subtabs, she didn’t find what she really wanted. What she really wanted was selfish: she didn’t find any answers about her.

Plenty of people were glad to talk about her kind, which at first had seemed like a thrilling revelation. It had seemed like that for quite a while, actually. But when she’d sifted through it for long enough, the patterns that made themselves clear didn’t give her any satisfaction. 

For all her seeking, the profusion of what turned up was nothing but freight tons of thin and watery speculation, conspiracy, most of it contradictory. What had finally propelled her off the planet was the realization that if she wanted to know what the article on what she was should say, she had to go find it herself.

Maya’s information bender had lasted for months. For Angel, who the whole world isn’t new to the way it was to Maya, it only lasts about six straight hours before she gets saturated and puts the ECHO down.

It’s gone fully dark out by the time they get outside for their daily tour around the grounds. She never goes out with Angel at night, and their setting, which is by now familiar, is less so without the sunlight excoriating it. As she shuts the door behind her, Maya scans the stretch of ground around them and tries to distinguish the purply dark shapes of the landscape.

When Maya goes to move, Angel lingers in her spot. Her head is tipped right up at the sky, and she seems to be caught there for the moment, transfixed.

“Oh,” she says. “There’s stars.”

*

“But you must have seen stars, back before,” Maya says the next day. “You were a space station. You must have been swimming in stars, you must have been sick of them.”

“Yes, I saw them,” says Angel. “But through cameras, or through windows through cameras. It doesn’t look the same. They look flatter like that.”

“They’re a million miles away! They’re all already flat.”

Angel shakes her head. “It’s different,” she says. “Any time I look at the sky, it’s different. It feels bigger in person than I remember it being.”

She laces her fingers in front of her stomach. “It’s all different now. Everything should feel closer, right? Now that I can see the world in person, and touch it, and live in it. And sometimes it does. But sometimes I feel like there’s a…disconnect between me and the rest of the world. I know I’m there. But it doesn’t feel like I’m part of it.”

She picks at her cuticles. “Being alive is so much _work _,” she says. “I didn’t know that before.”__

____

*

“We should get you a gun,” Maya announces one day, mostly out of nowhere.

Angel stares at her. “Why?”

“Well, everyone should have a gun. It’s a good thing to have. Lilith left a bunch of crap in the back of the car, you can go find something you like.”

Angel balks. “Are you serious? You’re just going to _give_ me a weapon?”

“That’s what I’m saying, yes,” says Maya.

“That’s—why would you do that? That’s a terrible idea. What if I got the wrong idea with it? I could kill you,” Angel says, but her voice is high and touched with an edge of the hysterical, and it doesn’t at all sound like a threat.

Maya can’t help but scoff a little. “Well, I don’t know about _that_.”

“I’ve never even shot a gun. I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

Maya raises her eyebrows. “Weren’t you just telling me how you might kill me?”

“I’m just saying, isn’t that something _you_ should be concerned about, just as a possibility, and I could still kill you by accident, or probably on purpose if I really tried—”

Maya cuts her off. “I can show you if you don’t know how to shoot,” she says. “And if you go and use that knowledge to kill me, well, so be it on my head, I guess.”

Angel won’t even look at the array of firearms piled up in the car, so Maya ends up picking one out for her, the least threatening, easiest to handle little Dahl pistol she can find. She takes Angel outside, where she goes with some reluctance, and holds it out to her.

“I just want you to have it,” Maya says, “you don’t even ever have to shoot anyone with it. You can just have it to wave at someone to threaten them if you need to. But you should at least know _how_ to use it before you do.”

She loads the pistol for Angel and hands it to her. She takes it apprehensively.

“Alright, hand up—hold your wrist straight—your other hand comes up here—” Maya comes around the side of her and adjusts her grip. “Okay, stand with your feet a little farther apart. Don’t lean back. That’s better.”

“Safety’s right here.” Maya guides her finger to it. “You feel that? That’s off. And you can figure out where the trigger is, yeah?”

She steps back behind Angel. “Okay. Just shoot it, just so you know what it feels like. Don’t worry about hitting anything yet.”

Angel’s finger curls in the lightest, most minute motion. It has all the strength of being brushed by a butterfly’s antennae, and doesn’t budge the mechanism. Maya advises, “Now, you gotta squeeze a little harder than that—”

Angel jerks her finger toward her palm all at once. At the sound of the gunshot, she full-body flinches and nearly drops the thing.

“Alright. There we go,” says Maya. “Not so twitchy on the trigger, though. We’ll work on it on the next try.”

Maya has her fire a couple more shots off at nothing until she can pull the trigger more smoothly and without losing her footing. Once she’s a little less skittish with the gun in her hand, Maya scrounges up some pieces of litter and scrap plastic to get her to try hitting something.

It takes two tries before Angel manages to pull together the accuracy to put a hole through a piece of a car bumper. At the sound of the impact on the metal, Maya claps her hands together and announces, “Alright!” Angel appears half surprised for a moment, then beams, looking proud.

As she goes on trying, it becomes apparent that the girl really cannot aim for shit. Yes, she’s never handled a gun before, but Maya’s pretty sure _she_ wasn’t this bad when she started. But better for Angel to have this and be bad at it than for her to have nothing at all, Maya thinks. She has Angel move closer to her target (and then when that’s not enough of a correction, again, even closer) until she can make contact most of the time.

Her precision is still all over the place, and she can’t hit close to the same place twice, but she seems to make small adjustments drifting in the direction of improvement. Once, either by luck or by practice, she manages to nail a fragment of a road sign dead through the center of the O in what probably used to say _STOP_. The sheet of metal is about a foot wide, small enough to tuck under an arm, and when they go back inside, Angel picks it up and takes it with her.

**Author's Note:**

> hey thanks for reading!!
> 
> this fic is gonna be pretty long and i write slow, so updates may take a while. in the meantime you can hmu on [tumblr](https://holtblvd.tumblr.com) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/pavlovsannabell).
> 
> if you enjoyed maybe leave a comment! your feedback sustains me.


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